In Denver there seems to be only three seasons: winter, summer and construction. Denver has not been spared building projects and until recently even the DU Web site was under renovation.

On Sept. 10, www.du.edu was given the finishing touches of what had been several months’ worth of touch-ups. In a joint mission between Webmaster Teri Hoyer of University Technology Services (UTS) and Director of Web Development Karen Harolds, of the Office of Communication and Marketing, DU’s home pages were given a complete cosmetic makeover: while leaving most of the link and internal content intact. Hoyer and Harolds wanted to “enhance the emotional images of student life” by including more pictures of the campus and student life.

Second, there was a need to maintain user continuity. All the links and pages are still in the same places, but now they look better. Lastly, a gradual approach was adopted slowly over the summer when usage was the lightest.

Since its inception in 1999, traffic on DU’s website has increased steadily with more than 2 million documents, about 42,819,000 bytes, transferred this month already. And since the bandwidth was doubled last year, users should experience little trouble surfing the site, even at 3 p.m. – the busiest time of the day.

The most common complaint is about the Search Engine. Either it brings back too many “hits” (positive matches), none at all, or it’s just too hard to figure out. Hoyer said that most search engines are either “precision or recall based.” DU’s engine is recall based: it brings back any and all documents that could possibly match the query, and is by far the most common among university Web sites.